Gov. Gary Herbert selects Utah state school board candidates

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The governor has chosen 14 candidates to appear on the November ballot for seven state school board seats, including all the interested incumbents, his office announced Thursday.

Originally, about 70 Utahns filed to run for seven seats on the 15-member board that oversees and guides education in Utah. As required by state law, a governor-appointed committee then narrowed the field to 37 candidates and interviewed them.

It's a process that's drawn criticism for years with many claiming it takes choice out of voters' hands. In years past, some incumbents didn't make it onto the ballot. But lawmakers have been unable to reach agreement on how to change the process, with some pushing to make the races partisan and others trying to make them nonpartisan but direct.

This year, Breck England, whom the committee rejected as a candidate for the board's District 5 seat, filed a lawsuit claiming the process is unconstitutional and that the committee practiced "viewpoint discrimination" in violation of the First Amendment when selecting candidates. Similar lawsuits have been filed in years past.

But many have praised this year's process as the most open and straightforward in years, thanks largely to committee chairman and former House Speaker Nolan Karras. The committee conducted all of its deliberations and voting in public, unlike in some previous years.

"This was a really sincere, conscious effort to put in not candidates that had one vision or another, one political leaning or another," said Debra Roberts, a state school board member who is not running for re-election. Her sister also served on the committee. "They made the best of a bad process."

Candidates selected by the governor include:

• District 1 (parts of Morgan, Rich, Box Elder and Cache counties):

David L. Clark, an associate vice president at Utah State University

Terryl Warner, incumbent and victim advocate at the Cache County Attorney's Office

• District 2 (Weber County):

Spencer F. Stokes, government relations

Willard Z. Maughan, physician

• District 3 (Tooele County and part of Salt Lake County around Magna and West Valley City):

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